netINS Inc.

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Since beginning in 1993 on a single server, netINS has grown its customer base to become one of the two largest independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Iowa. E-mail traffic has grown to 10 million messages per day, straining the underlying Sun Enterprise 420R servers which had helped it grow. On a weekly basis, e-mail applications faltered, requiring attention from systems administrators to avoid interrupting customer service.

Customer facing applications and Internet connection solutions ran on server technologies ranging in age from eight-to-ten year old Compaq Alpha servers to late-model Sun Netra 240, 210 and 120 servers. The company wanted to virtualize and consolidate its older servers. It also needed a redundant, remote disaster recovery site in order to serve the corporate Web hosting market it wanted to penetrate.

As soon as Steve Guntly, Manager of Systems Administration for netINS, saw the Sun Fire T2000 server with its innovative Chip Multithreading Technology and UltraSPARC T-1 processors, he knew one solution was at hand. “We’d been happy with the Sun platform,” says Guntly. “So we were really just looking for something with more horsepower. From a price/performance perspective, there was nothing we could have found that matches the Sun Fire T2000 servers.”

For its disaster recovery solution, netINS chose Sun Netra ATCA CT900 Blade Server with Sun Netra CP3010 UltraSPARC ATCA and Sun Netra CP3020 Opteron ATCA blades. One compact, high-performance and compute-dense Sun Netra ATCA CT900 at netINS’s headquarters in Des Moines and two others at its remote disaster recovery site, when completed, will provide fully redundant applications for corporate customers.

netINS has also been able to virtualize and consolidate many of its less critical servers using the Solaris Containers feature in the Solaris 10 Operating System. “We’re able to consolidate four of our old boxes onto one newer box using Solaris Containers,” says Guntly. “We plan to do this with a number of other systems. Reduced server hardware, licensing and labor costs will lower our TCO by about 50 percent.”

Des Moines-based Open Technologies, Inc., a Sun Advantage Partner, provided the Sun solutions as well as Solaris training classes from Sun Learning Services.

Now netINS has seen its e-mail problems cease. The time required to administer e-mail service and monitor servers has dropped 90 percent from 40 to 60 hours a week to 4 to 6 hours a week, enabling the staff to work on more strategic projects.

As a test, Guntly set up the entire e-mail stream to be handled by a pair of Sun Fire T2000 servers for a day, replacing the standard configuration of four servers. It was “not even breathing hard,” he says, measuring a UNIX Load Average Value of 2 (the number of processes waiting for CPU time) when his previous e-mail servers had registered 40 and even 50 handling the same volume. That’s a twentyfold increase in performance. “Now we’re set to continue growing and soon we’ll be able to tap a new corporate hosting market with our fully redundant disaster recovery site,” he says. “This is a very good prospect for the future.”